Instructional Practices

The more I read through Strategies That Work, the more I'm reminded that everything we do is supported by our instructional practices. The authors provide several examples of lessons that teachers have done with particular pieces of literature, including quotes from students and teachers taken from the lesson itself. And I think about how the practice, the teacher's support of student thinking, the student input back to the class and to the content are all so important. But it's the instructional practice that will make a difference.

Here's how my brain is connecting with this in terms of helping teachers to use technology: if we don't teach the instructional practice as the basis right along with the technology tools, we're not getting anywhere. If I want students to use Diigo, for instance, I have to have built some background knowledge about research, notetaking, etc. as well as supporting their learning through collaboration in order for students to fully understand the power of this particular tool. If I were just to show students how to use Diigo to bookmark, highlight and annotate online material it would mean nothing because there is no real connection to anything that they already have knowledge of to pull from. But, if I spend time helping students understand the research process and I've worked to give them multiple opportunities to collaborate with each other then these experiences would give them some background knowledge to pull from. In order to learn new skills, we require practice. In order to form new understandings, we need to be able to connect prior knowledge to new information. In our rush to use any tools, whether they are so-called Web 2.0 tools or the kinds of tools of the classroom that we hold in our hands, we must have some knowledge of what it takes to learn the skills needed for these tools or order to implement them for lasting results.

That's my thought for today....and I'm stickin' with it!

I'm going to use this one...

I love quotes! That's why I have a feed so I get 3 or 4 in my Bloglines everyday. Today there was one that I just had to save and I'll be working it into the workshops I'm planning for right now. Here it is:

"The shortest distance between two points is under construction." --Noelie Altito

Sometimes we forget that the learning process is always under construction. It seem especially so when we're talking about technology. Teachers feel that they can't use technology effectively if the students know more than them. Tough position to put yourself in! What about thinking about building connections between your instructional practice and student learning by constructing the best road possible? For some that construction will take a long time and will be filled with many potholes. For others, the work will go smoothly and will take only minor adjustments to perfect. But for all of us, there is a need to keep on working together to find and build the best pathway that we can.

Connecting with Literacy

For me, preparing to teach a workshop for teachers is sometimes a long process. Beginning with a kernal of an idea, I create a description of the workshop that tends to summarize the concept of what I hope to get across. From there, I begin to look at all the supporting skills that will be needed as well as the background information that participants will need. This is where it gets a little messy. Many times I have so many ideas I'd like to convey but not enough time to do so effectively. So, I then begin to refine my thinking and try to let go of some of the content, no matter how cool I think it is, and focus on the simplest, most effective ideas that teachers could begin with - we can always build onto these ideas later.

Knowing about the technology is the easy part - I spend a lot of time trying to keep as current as I can on what's available online. Our district software is also familiar to me so, no problem there. Let's face it - some of the stuff on the web today is just way too cool! You get sucked into it right away and somewhere in your head you're saying, " Wow! I can't believe you can do this kind of stuff! This is too cool!" But, "cool" doesn't last too long when you're a classroom teacher pressured by the demands of the curriculum, the testing and any number of other concerns.

The real meat of the workshop, for me, really has less to do with the technology and more to do with the pedagogy - what teaching practices or research based strategies are teachers reading about, are currently in publication, or support the work I know is going on in our buildings. Even more importantly, what do I think teachers need to be aware of that they may not be aware of (new publications, new research) or that we can draw upon from their background knowledge in order to make connections to the use of the tools that we'll be addressing in the workshop?

The curriculum - research - professional literature - tools connections are important to me for a number of reasons. My job title used to be under the supervision of the technology department. That put me in a position of knowing a lot about the tools but there was also the larger misconception that I was technical support. More frequently than not, I was being asked for technical support rather than teaching support. In other words, no connection to teaching practice.

Now my job title is under the supervision of the curriculum department. That change is about two years old now. Before that occurred, I had begun to participate in the work of the district to construct better curriculum documents. By doing this, I was able to better understand the curriculum that was being established and could make some suggestions about how technology could support student learning in each of the content areas. The more I can engage a teacher in a discussion about their curriculum and their pedagogical practices the better advantage I have in helping to make that curriculum to technology connection.

As I continue to formulate this workshop, I'm using as my prime resource the second edition of a book titled Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Undersatnding and Engagement by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. I read the first edition so when I saw that a second edition had been published I was interested to see what had changed. They've added lots of new content and I'm finding myself writing lots of notes about technology connections around the margins of the pages. Because I've been involved in data analysis related to our ELA assessments, I'm also seeing this book as a resource for strategies that teachers can use to address some of the needs we've been identifying. Another way for me to connect with the work of our classrooms!

So, I'm going to go back to work on the reading, thinking and planning and will make myself stop to reflect on my work by writing a little bit more.

Podcasting as an Assessment of the Research Process

I've been thinking about podcasting for a long time - learning the tools needed (easy!) and trying to understand what it takes to really make podcasting a learning experience that makes a difference in instruction (a little more challenging!).

A while back I had worked at looking at what it takes to create a podcast and that brought my thoughts back to Understanding by Design. In their book, Wiggins and McTighe discuss lesson design using what they call a backwards design - establish the learning goals then begin to work on the assessment. Interesting... Most of us were probably taught to design a lesson from beginning to end. The problem became that, by the time you got to wrapping up the lesson, no worthwhile assessment was in sight or the assessment had nothing to do with the learning goals in the first place.

I was brought back to UbD in a conversation with a school librarian who has been thinking about how he could make use of podcasting in his program. As we began to discuss this, the conversation turned to the thought that the podcast itself isn't the point of the learning, it's really the assessment. If we use the UbD idea of lesson planning then, we need to think about the skills that need to be taught or reinforced in order for the student to be successful in completing the assessment of learning. Well...if we want our students to present information orally, then we need to teach them how to find good information in the first place. That information seeking needs some definition - what are we looking for? what questions are going to be addressed? The research process - no matter what the information task is - perfectly supports the process of creating a podcast. So we drew a visual to help ourselves think through this:What do students need to know and be able to do in order to successfully create the podcast? The students will be taken carefully through the skills with the research process.

What's the podcast going to be about? We thought about two things realizing that there are many, many possibilities:
• book reviews (taking a look at the really nicely done book reviews at BookLook as an example)
• content area focus such as Social Studies: take on the role of an early 20th century immigrant and tell us about your decision to come to the US and what your life was like after you settled in this country.

So our information specialist then has his work cut out for him but he also has a very clear focus on the skills that he'll be working to refine with his students. We're also looking at what other technology tools will support this. For example, for task definition and information seeking strategies, we'd like students to know more about using Inspiration for organizing information. For location and access, we'd like students to learn more about using search tools and library subscription sources. Not only do we want them to bookmark what they find for easy access but we're thinking that if we show them how to bookmark using Diigo then we can easily have them gather notes from their sources by using the annotation feature of this tool - this will apply to use of information. Then we'll work with them to synthesize what they've learned - probably taking some wisdom from Tony Vincent's work on Radio WillowWeb and the strategies he shares for structuring podcasts with students. And finally, the podcast! We'd like to employ some learning from 6+1 writing traits and make use of the RAFTS strategy. We'll define a role, give the students an idea of their audience (worldwide and published on the web!), describe and model the format, present the topic and explain the focus, and provide them with the strong verbs that will guide them - describe, explain.

Recent talk among edubloggers has been focused on our thinking about the product as being the end of the learning rather than the beginning of new possibilities, new learning. I believe that, with a project such as this, we'll be forming new thinking about learning with our students and will be giving them a solid foundation for thinking about the creative expression of learning and the process that's involved. This is going to be an exciting project which might also serve to be an advertisement for the possibilities when you collaborate in meaningful ways with your building's true information specialist.

Collaborating with the Most Important Resource in the School

During the past two years, I've been involved in a project called PALS through our regional library system. What's an instructional technology specialist doing involved in a library system initiative? Learning! Learning! Learning! and, I hope, helping to promote the technology tools that can empower the learning of our students.

We're working toward building collaborative relationships with classroom teachers.
Toni Buzzeo worked with us for two days this week. She helped us learn about the different types of relationships that exist between teachers and librarians and begin to develop ideas for getting through the challenges of making changes in those relationships despite the sometimes impossibly inflexible schedules that exist in our buildings. After some learning with Toni, we worked solidly for a full day and a half building lessons and units designed to tap into the expertise of both the teacher and the librarian to affect student achievement. We've also been privileged to work with David Loertscher who helped us explore better ways to write collaborative plans that take learning to a higher level.

Through data analysis, we're working on helping our librarians understand the kinds of skills that students are being asked to use to perform on state assessments. Until last year, the first group of librarians to be part of the PALS project had not been exposed to any of our state assessments. Many didn't know what the test consisted of and hadn't seen any of the sources we have for looking at the data analysis related to these assessments. (OK...I know all about the evils of state assessments. If there's one thing we can gain from them it's the understanding that we're just not expecting very high level thinking from our students on a regular basis.)

We're working on understanding the relationships between the data we get from assessments, the classroom curriculum and how the library program supports the development of skills.
We've been looking at our data for the past two years in terms of the skills needed to answer questions, where that skill is reflected in our curriculum documents and what strategies we're already using to teach those skills. I think it's a good process. In some of our elementary buildings, our librarians are being included in the data analysis process for the first time ever. This is a step in the right direction. Including our information specialists in on the results of an assessment that's all about dealing with information is a step in the right direction.
One thing that makes this process especially effective is that we have some great curriculum documents in my school district. The state standards are way too broad, the performance indicators get a little bit closer. But, by having the documents that we do, we can really focus in more closely on the skills and we've been able to be more specific at each grade level rather than just a general statement that is supposed to apply to the range from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Two things I would recommend to school librarians if I may be so bold. :)
1. Start asking questions about the testing that's going on locally or at the state level. Ask to see a test booklet, think about the skills that students are being asked to demonstrate and begin to examine your own teaching practices where those skills are concerned. Get somebody to help you understand what the learning gaps are.
2. Read the professional literature about instruction and about the brain and learning. Some recommendations:

• Improving Student Achievement One Teacher at a Time - Jane E. Pollock
• Classroom Instruction That Works - Marzano, Pickering, Pollock
• Teaching with the Brain in Mind - Eric Jensen
• Strategies That Work - Harvey and Goudvis
  

Made to Stick

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog but I haven't abandoned it - just needed some time to work through some projects in my job and absorb some reading I've been doing. Some bloggers write in their blogs as they read. When I read a book, I still work through it the old-fashioned way. I spend time with it underlining the ideas that click with me and noting any connections that occur to me. I also keep a notebook close by where I write down longer thoughts or connections to return to at a later time.

My latest book just finished this weekend was, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. For those of us who do professional development or are teacher leaders, this is one book to have on your shelf.

So many ideas are constantly floating around in my head. They coming spilling out quickly when I come across a situation where the ideas might be applied. The problem is that my background knowledge is much different than my colleagues. As a result of reading the book, I'm trying to develop a very simple core message that will filter through all of my work. For many years, I've filtered a lot of decisions about technology uses in the classroom by asking two questions: "So what?" and "Then what?" Both really center on improving student learning. The "so what?" question means this - if we want to improve student learning what difference will this use of technology make in the learning? This is the question that really makes us justify what we're doing both for present learning situations and future needs. The "then what?" question is all about how students are going to use the technology to make a difference. Many times we might send students to a computer to make a web of their ideas or search for a website - but then what? A web of ideas made in Kidspiration or Inspiration could be the start of a unit of study. A class created web placed into a shared folder can be a resource for students to return to often. As they learn new material they can return to the web to confirm or revise the web or to re-organize the ideas. Personal start pages such as Pageflakes or Protopage provide tools for organizing learning and offer tools for outlining a unit of study which can be checked by students as they progress through the learning.

I supposed these two questions are still simple enough to remain my core message as I work with teachers. As a matter of fact, I first began to use these two questions during training with teacher and still have some of them repeat that back to me whenever we discuss new uses of technology. So I guess it was "sticky" enough after all!

RSS Made Really Easy

Here's a video courtesy of The Common Craft Show that explains RSS in the simplest terms you're likely to find anywhere. From their site:

"The Common Craft show is a new series of videos done in a format we call "paperwork". Our goal is to make technology easier to understand for the less geeky people of the world."

The video is well worth showing to teachers to provide an introduction to the concept of RSS but is also a really clear explanation that would help students understand it in practical terms. They're looking for suggestions for other videos that people might find useful.

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

Simple Shifts Make a Difference

Sometimes, simple shifts make big differences. That's what hit me today when I woke up and it's been running around in my head all day long.

One way that was demonstrated to me was in a conversation with a teacher recently. We had a conversation one day about Pageflakes as a tool for pre-exposure to the learning goals for the day. Typically, this teacher, like many others, would place a list of tasks on the board or on the computer (then projected on a screen) that students must accomplish before the day's learning began. We began to think about using Pageflakes as a tool for pre-exposure to all of the learning planned for the day and she decided to use it for a little while to see what student's reactions would be. When I spoke with her about a week later, she remarked how it was having a positive effect on some of her students who now came into the classroom and saw the entire day's schedule not just a list of tasks to do. Many of these students also have the need to have the day's schedule close at hand to refer back to so they would go to the computer and print out a copy of the schedule and tape it to the corner of their desk. Simple shifts in daily routines had a positive effect on these students. Knowing was what next on the day's agenda provided the big picture that these students needed.

What other simple shifts have gone on that have now become something that we include in our instruction, that can produce powerful results for our students? One simple shift that many teachers made in their classrooms was configuring their desks from rows to clusters. This simple shift meant that students were no longer facing the front or looking at the backs of each others heads. They were now facing each other giving the teacher easier ways of inviting discussion and collaboration. Simple shifts...

Here are a few simple shifts that produce powerful results that I've listed for today - would anyone like to add others? What shifts have you noticed in your own practice? What is the power behind simple shifts? How does intent, value and purpose change as we make simple shifts?
• From full videos that the teacher controlled and showed to the whole class to downloadable video clips that the student can control and access when needed. The impact of this shifts control to the students, enables visual representation of complex concepts and these clips can be embedded into a Word document or PowerPoint for instruction or for individualized use.
• From using crayons, paints, etc. to using software drawing tools to create visual models and simple pictures. The software tools allow many more creative uses to create the visual.
• From surfing the Internet to RSS feeds. When I first started to read blogs, I would go to the links on one person's blog to get to others. Now, I use Bloglines and, at a glance, I know when newly published additions to those blogs have been created. That simple shift has saved lots of time and organized the content that I'm most interested in seeing on a daily basis. In addition to blogs, I also pull in some favorite comics, daily quotes and a feed from a local news station.
• From writing ideas down on pieces of paper to publishing ideas to the web or saving them to my Google docs. Simple shift...now I write on the computer and place it on my blog or create documents that I can access without having to have my own personal computer in front of me. Life was often complicated by trying to find those pieces of paper at just the right time. Now, I just simply log in to find it all.
• From publishing to the teacher to publishing to the world. This provides our students with a much more powerful and far reaching audience. This one simple shift is free and can be implemented in about 10 minutes.
• Talking on the phone to talking over Skype with video - this one simple shift made an impact on my youngest daughter who told me one day that she wished we had done this last year, that being able to see us when we talk makes a difference to her and would have helped during her first year away at college.
• From taking notes on paper when using the web to taking notes using Diigo. This simple shifts means that we collect and categorize our notes all in one place and can extract notes from a group of websites easily. I have to keep catching myself when I start to write things down on paper as I visit sites and remind myself that Diigo makes it easier to find these notes later on.
• The NETS standards shifted from beginning with basic skills to beginning with creativity. That simple shift changes the tone and intent of the document and places it squarely in the 21st century.

That's just a few for now. Please add to the list!

Innovation and Creativity

Here's a really neat video from YouTube. When you know your craft and your tools intimately, you are able to be creative in how you use them and can produce innovative ways of presenting the use of your tools.

Challenging Issues

Miguel Guhlin writes today about a posting by Jennifer on her blog My Integrating Technology Journey and he asks how others might respond to the questions that Jennifer was presented with during an interview. OK…I love a challenge! Though this gets long, it was a great opportunity to think through some of these issues tonight.

These questions seemed to fall into some categories so I’ve taken them and regrouped them into the categories that made sense to me. My answers to these questions are in italics at the bottom of each category.

Procedural Knowledge – Skills and Procedures
* You need to spend almost two months teaching how to use all the new tools and English practice will only be possible later in the year?
* How can you be sure that students won’t write dirty stuff (this was the concept they used)
Answer: Yes, I need time in the beginning to make sure that students have the specific skills that will enable them to use the tools efficiently and effectively. Once we have these skills in place, we’ll be better able to use the tools to our advantage for learning. In other words, the procedural knowledge that we build will support the declarative knowledge which is the understanding of the concepts we’re going to learn this year. Since our focus will be on the learning, I’m confident that the students won’t be thinking about writing inappropriate things. However, if they do, we’ll deal with this within the concept of the learning and how such conduct affects the learning of the individual as well as the class.

Instructional Tools/Materials
* What’s a blog?
* What’s a wiki? My question what is the wiki for???
* What’s a podcast? But we can’t incorporate them at school because we don’t have loud speakers.
* What are yahoo groups?
Answer: Blogs, wikis and podcasts are tools that allow us to be creative, collaborative and communicative – all of these are skills needed by our students to be well prepared for the work world of the 21st century. Specifically, a blog is a tool for communication. They provide us with the ability to develop and reflect on our thoughts and ideas and for others to contribute to that development and reflection. Blogs place our written expression in front of a larger audience than what has traditionally been available. Wikis promote collaboration. With their use, students will be able to collaboratively create content and will be able to continually work to edit and refine that content. The wiki, because of its ability to retain the history of those changes, will serve as a way for us to evaluate the progress of our work and our thinking as the content is developed. The podcast serves as a creative means of communicating learning of a concept. In order to create a podcast, students need to have done a tremendous amount of learning and then must be able to summarize their learning in such a way as to communicate this in a brief amount of time. Students collaborating to communicate their learning in creative ways is one way to summarize the use of a podcast instructionally.

Management of the environment
* Kids can never be left alone in the computer lab
* What happens with students that don’t have a computer home how can they follow your subject?
* If computers don’t work what will they do?
* There will be two students per computer-how will they work?
Answer: Management issues need to be taken into consideration whether we’re using technology or not. Can students be left alone (anywhere) if they are engaged in a learning task? The answer here can be yes, especially if we’ve taken the time to build understanding of the goals, use of the tools and expectations for the students’ responsibility in the learning process. The issue of computer access is not just for this class but for our school as a whole. Access at home is an issue that we have no control over and therefore, we will work to be sure that students are working outside the classroom on the planning and organizing needed before we create the product. In other words, they’ll be working through the process prior in order to create the product. Access to computers in school is something we need to consider as a school, as an educational community. In order for our students to be prepared for their future, they need to have access to the tools that they will be using. We need to work closely with our technology department and with all levels of administration to be sure that the 21st century learning tools and resources that our students need are available to them at all times. We need to also consider strategies for expanding access to technology for our students. While two students per computer is not the way that they will work in the real world and it will provide some challenges to us, I’m confident that our students are mature enough or will continually develop the maturity needed to deal with sharing the access. In the meantime, we can work together to plan for expanding access to technology within our school community.

Assessment
* Who manages and reads the blogs?
* You must correct every blog entry
* I want it to be exam oriented not to be a open classroom.
* What about assessment
* You must support the teacher and use technology as a means of allowing the teacher to improve her students practice for International exams
Answer: The “big picture” of instruction in the classroom has four important pieces. Instructional goals, instructional strategies, grading and assessment. The end result of instruction is the construction of new knowledge. Exams will come and go but what our students take with them out into the world is even more important. If we do our jobs well as teachers, we will design assessments that give us a picture of how our students have achieved the instructional goals and use their learning to construct new knowledge. Our students don’t need to be better test takers, they need to be better readers, writers, and learners.

Professionalism
* Plan your classes very well because if not it will all be a waste of time .
Answer: You hired me because of my expertise as an educator, because I have skills that you considered desirable in someone who is to be responsible for the education of children. Planning for student success and continual learning will always be my top priority. It is the most important part of my job whether I place my students in front of a computer or in front of a stack of books. My lessons will be designed to take maximum advantage of the learning situation and the learning tools. No time is ever wasted if the students are engaged in the learning process.